What a long time since I last did a full site update, in October of last year. I
knew I had been concentrating on people of the last two centuries but thought that
would not lead to many addition: I was astonished, and gratified, that this
comparative inactivity had led to another 1,000 on the master file, I should find
out where they all came from.

An important work has been to finalise the update for the College of Arms. While
the C of A are prepared to accept my word for all my siblings and their
descendants, I eventually found it necessary to get birth and marriage - and
divorce - certificates for most of them. I have even acquired the needed
certificate for a marriage in a restaurant in the Bahamas. A learning point was
that the High Courts have a good skill for finding divorce information and that
the bare divorce details are easily available; in the process I enquired if there
was anything on my paternal grandparents' separation, but they had registered
nothing; on the other hand I have a long series of written exchanges with some
lawyers on the negotiations for that separation; the upshot is that I still do
not know the date when the agreement was finalised.

Some interest was expressed in all this by sundry relations so I have commissioned
the College to do an armorial pedigree showing the descendants of my grandfather;
I then hope to make and distribute copies to those who are interested. As ever, I
expect the artwork to be superb.

This progress enabled me to attend to the long felt ambition to have some joined
up heraldry and genealogy within the College, that is to link together the Trotters
and ourselves to endorse the additional quartering of the Trotter arms. The
Trotters had last appeared in the College's records in 1868 when the Royal Licence
was obtained for William Brown to take the name and arms of Trotter. The
complication here was that William Brown had no arms, as the College wished to
quarter his with those of Trotter; so he rather hastily applied to the Lyon Court
in Scotland for some and these were duly granted in early 1869, a bit late for
the Royal Licence, but let us not dwell on that. The much more remarkable thing
to me was that William Trotter, formerly Brown, did not bother to register with
the College his large family of 13 children, of whom 10 were still alive at the
time of the Royal Licence. Not unnaturally, if I was to establish any right to
quarter Trotter, I was asked to provide a full list of all William Trotter's
children and grandchildren; thus including my grandmother, the asserted heiress.

My grandmother was already in the College's records so the fact that I could
assert her existence anyway did me no good. I was obliged to provide documentary
evidence for all of them. This was very educative for me, forcing me into nooks
and crannies that I had not been too careful about before. The rapidly found
first problem was that none, not one, of William Trotter's children had had their
birth registered, even though eleven of them had been born after registration
started. Slowly I managed to find their baptisms, massively assisted by the
photograph I had recently received of their mother's list in her large bible of
her children giving their birth and baptism dates. I still believe that all the
children were baptised, not least because William Trotter's brother Henry Brown
was a clergyman in London and did several of the baptisms. But I have only
found eleven of the baptisms; the two not found are both said in all the
censuses to have been born in Penshurst Kent, but there is no entry for them in
the original parish register which is still held by the parish. I have relied
on the censuses as evidence of their birth.

Eventually I found the marriages and wills or admons for all those who survived
to adulthood, noting in the course of this that it was much quicker to search
for their wills in the will index books than for their deaths on the death
certificate records.

The object in all this was to prove that my grandmother was a heraldic heiress.
She had three brothers. The two elder died in their thirties and clear
evidence survives that they were unmarried at death. Her youngest brother
lived to 89 and it is not clear that he died unmarried. We all, of course,
knew that he was single as he, on his own, would send us generous Christmas
presents to his great-nephews and nieces every year. But this was not
evidence; conscious of this I had a few years before his death got my father
to sign a pedigree of his mother's family and explicitly confirm that none of
his uncles and aunts ever married. I obtained my gt-uncle's will which
mentioned no wife or offspring. I hope that will do! The results of my
researches, some 89 documents, have been deposited with the College for them
to make of it all what they can.

With all this done, I could catch up with the problems of storage for all
the files for this site. In total it now amounts to some 357 Mbytes, way
in excess of PlusNet's (my ISP) allowance of 200 Mbytes. I had been
putting some of it on a little computer by my side here, but I had received
complaints that sometimes the connection failed and in any case we turn it
all off when we leave the house. So I have installed the whole site on
FreeOLA, who impose no storage limit. This meant rebuilding all the links
that had been pointing at the little machine here.

This meant I had to examine not a few old offerings and, inevitably, I was
a little concerned. Heraldry in particular incurred my displeasure so I
decided to take advantage of the larger file space available and hope that
most people now have much faster internet links than when I started.
Heraldry now has quite a lot of heraldry in it; nothing brilliant but I
trust you will find it acceptable as representational art. Heraldry has
had a total makeover and is much better for it; I am not a little wiser
than when I first wrote those pages. One or two bits still to do, notably
the provision of a list of the additional medieval arms that we may
quarter; I hope to provide representations of all of these.

Finally, Robert Tipping recently came up with a gem from an old document
which rapidly led to a few earlier generations of Latton and Yate
ancestors for the Tippings.